Light Speed Idea #1 – Experiment

One of the important things we learn from the quality movement is the importance of experiments. If you know how long something takes, you can set up experiments to see if an approach to learning is faster or not.

So if you test a reading assignment versus a lecture or a game or elearning, you can see which one actually effects learning speed the most. Other experiments might involve looking at the amount and timing of practice or the effects of different types of feedback.

The big point is that if you want to speed up learning, you need to know how much time it takes now and then experiment to make things faster.

3 Responses

I think that there is a definite place in the world for the use of experimentation. And you are correct we can learn much from the proper types of experiments.

I wonder what kind of experiments you are thinking of implementing. I would think there is an issue with consistency when you are doing these as everyone is so different, and if you are testing so many people that are “alike” – the results would be tainted or skewed??
I wonder – can you shed some light on the topic? As the results of this kind of work could be ground breaking in many ways.

Actually, we’ve been able to work in environments where you have large numbers of students where it’s easier to set up tests. With large enough numbers you can overcome some of the consistency issues because things tend to average out. When you’re talking about one or two students you do get a lot of variation.

Also when you’re talking about speeding things up, you’re often looking at what’s happened in the past and then taking time out of the process.

Here’s an example, in a call center the training had a lot of knowledge tests. What they were finding is that those who did well on the tests weren’t often the one’s who did well on the job. So our test was to remove the paper and pencil tests and replace them with direct observation tests. The results were that the observation tests shortened up time to proficiency by leading to better coaching and feedback and second, it shortened the classroom time by removing all the test.

Here’s another example, a three hour classroom session was replaced by a two hour elearning. The effect on time to proficiency was about the same in fact those who went through the elearning did a little worse on the job. As a result, the investment in elearning was redirected.

We find the you can use a lot of the six sigma measurement approach to set up good experiments. A little knowledge of statistics helps as well.

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This blog is focused on anything related to learning faster. From time to time, I'll be posting about my book Learning Paths: Increase profits by reducing the time it takes to get up-to-speed (Pfeiffer 2004).
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